Ruidoso stews over wildlife feeding ban

From KRQE-TV.com - by Gabrielle Burkhart - RUIDOSO, N.M. (KRQE) - Wildlife officials and some Ruidoso residents are butting heads over a proposed ordinance that would ban feeding wildlife The ban would apply an area where officials say the animals have become a problem. Deer calmly grazing in someone's yard right next to the roads are lately not an uncommon sight in Ruidoso. It's part of the reason wildlife biologist Quentin Hays proposed an ordinance that would put a stop to people feeding wildlife in the village. "Just as the community grows, and particularly as we're faced with drought and sort of increases in these wildlife-human conflicts, I felt like it was something that really needed to be addressed," Hays explained. But the proposal isn't sitting well with some people. Hays said he believes the people feeding wildlife in Ruidoso are in the minority, but they're having a major impact. "We have deer and elk in our communities now that are completely unafraid of humans and of dogs and everything else," said Hays. He also explained that the concentrated deer population brings predators closer to humans, which also poses a threat. Read more

Share/Bookmark

Ski Apache to close season early; last run is Sunday

From the El Paso Times - By Victor R. Martinez - Skiers looking to get that one last run in before putting away the skis have until Sunday if they want to hit the slopes at Ski Apache. "We were going to try to push it back to April 8 but it's a little too warm," said Justin Rowland, director of operations at Ski Apache. "We are two weeks ahead of when we closed last year. But our last big snow fall was a week before the Texas spring break when we got about a foot of snow." Ski Apache, the ski resort in Alto, N.M., near Ruidoso, has drawn more than 140,000 skiers and snow boarders this season. "The snow, the staff and the beauty of the mountain were all magnificent this season," Rowland said. "The season was great. We had snow just at the right times. We had a lot of people up here which kept us very busy. We had a great season." Ruidoso was hit with heavy snowfall right before Christmas which helped during the always busy holiday season and again in mid-March when it received more than a foot of snow. The Ruidoso area was snowed upon again last week which increased the base on the slopes to 102 inches. Read more
Share/Bookmark

The Science of Half-Baked Ideas

From the American Thinker - by Christopher Chantrill -  The more we learn about climate science, the more we learn what a shabby, back-of-the-envelope business it is. Dr. Michael Mann, the climate science poster boy who simplified the global climate of the last millennium into a hockey stick, just came out with a book to remind us how anyone who disagrees with him is a shill for dark forces. It's déjà vu all over again, of course. Fifty years ago, another academic published a shabby little paper and then succeeded in bullying everyone into endorsing his view that saturated fat was the cause of heart disease. Ancel Keys, inventor of the K-ration and his wife (an expert in measuring cholesterol) investigated several hundred people in the general population of Naples, Italy in the early 1950s and found that they measured low on cholesterol and had less heart disease than the fat-eating Neapolitan rich. Keys decided pretty quickly that dietary fat was the main cause of heart disease and spent the next couple of decades doing research to confirm his hypothesis. The political situation back then was eerily familiar to our own time. In the early 1950s, the health establishment had just finished up the greatest public health success story of all time. With sanitation and vaccination, public heath had conquered the great scourges of infectious disease. So what could it do for an encore? It could solve the post-World War II heart-disease scare and apply the same epidemiological tools that had isolated the cause of cholera and typhoid. It was a no-brainer. Fast-forward to climate science in the 1980s. The environmental establishment had just achieved the great goals of clean air and clean water and had transformed the U.S. metropolitan environment. What could it do for an encore? It could apply the same science, public relations, and regulatory tools used for the environmental success and save the planet from catastrophic global warming!  Cimate science is a young science, and it doesn't know all that much about the climate. Not yet. The same was true back when heart disease became the number-one killer in the years immediately after World War II. What was killing all those middle-class Americans? Ancel Keys decided that it was the saturated fat in foods, and he couldn't wait for the results of his research -- people were dying. So he persuaded the government to fight cholesterol with low-fat diets right away. When the research results came in, they were close to the Folgers taste test: "no difference." But by then, big budgets and reputations were committed to the idea that a high-fat diet causes heart disease, and the government couldn't change its mind.  People with half-baked ideas that are not ready for prime time instinctively grasp that they need the bludgeon of government force. There's a long and tragic history of half-baked ideas linked up to government, from Horace Mann's half-baked idea in the 1830s that government education would reduce crime, Marx's half-baked critique of capitalism, and on to Lysenko and "whole language" reading.So also did Ancel Keys' cholesterol theory get established into a huge government war on fat.  Read column
Share/Bookmark

Swickard: Oh those Econ 101 deniers

Commentary by Michael Swickard - Last week’s column mentioned political energy policy as one of five major issues Americans need to keep their eyes on this election and not be distracted by hundreds of other lesser political issues. When I mentioned drilling to lower gas pump prices, my email filled up with Econ 101 deniers who said supply and demand does not work in the oil patch because oil is global. That answer is simple, quick and wrong.  Econ 101 deniers say all nations drink from only one bucket (a very large one) so the price of oil in India is exactly the same price as it is in Indiana. It is not. There are many reasons why crude oil price is different by nation, not the least of which is the actual purity of the oil. Further, we use oil products regionally; therefore regional influences adjust the prices. It is important to count the major ways our government is a factor in the pump price of fuel. Read column

Share/Bookmark

Cornyn Offers Amendment to Block Lizard Listing

From therepublic.com -Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas is trying to block the proposed listing of the dunes sagebrush lizard as an endangered species.  Cornyn on Wednesday filed an amendment to energy tax credit legislation that would block the lizard's addition to the federal endangered species list.  Echoing oil and natural gas producers throughout the Permian Basin, Cornyn says listing the species could bring production in parts of West Texas and southeastern New Mexico to "a screeching halt." Echoing oil and natural gas producers throughout the Permian Basin, Cornyn says listing the species could bring production in parts of West Texas and southeastern New Mexico to "a screeching halt." The basin produces more than 1 million barrels of oil a day.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has delayed until this summer a final decision on whether to list the lizard. Cornyn and congressional representatives from several other states had sent letters to the agency and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar asking for the delay.
Share/Bookmark

Will Obama Return $1.6 Million Raised by Spike Lee?

From Breitbart.com - by John Sexton - Which is really more important to this President: the tone of the national discourse or cold, hard cash?  A few days ago, Spike Lee sent what he believed to be George Zimmerman's home address into the midst of a racial firestorm. Should Obama return the $1.6 million he collected at a fundraiser in Lee's home this January to express his disapproval with this decision? Jim Treacher at the Daily Caller recalls a fundraiser President Obama held at the New York home of director Spike Lee in January. The Huffington Post reported on the evening, including the fact that the White House had approached Lee about hosting it. According to Spike, the event raised $1.6 million for the President's campaign: As the event finished, [Spike] wrote, "A Great Night. I Heard We Raised 1.6 Million Dollars From The Dinner Tonight. The President After The Q&A Shook Hands And Took Pictures.Ya-Dig." Dig this. A few days ago Spike retweeted an address he believed belonged to George Zimmerman, the shooter in the Trayvon Martin case. It's not clear what Spike hoped would happen to Zimmerman, but given the firestorm surrounding the case, he must have known it wouldn't be pretty.  Indeed, some of Spike's followers made death threats. Already at this point, Spike had crossed a line.  Only, as it turned out, the address Spike sent to his quarter million followers on Twitter was not George Zimmerman's address. It belonged to Elaine and David McClain, a couple in their 70s. The McClains have reportedly fled their home and have now retained an attorney.  So Spike Lee's actions were not only reckless and inflammatory; they were also stupid. So far, the entertainment media are being remarkably quiet about this scandal, almost as if they've decided to spike the story (couldn't resist).  But in this case, it's not just Spike's reputation but the President's that is on the line. Recall that President Obama, when asked, was happy to weigh in on offensive comments made by Rush Limbaugh. He expressed his concern about the tone of debate, a tone which could one day be turned against his daughters. He also made a personal call to Sandra Fluke to thank her for her public testimony. Isn't sending a person's home address to an angry mob looking for "justice" at least as problematic? And again, this isn't just any person; this is someone whose home Obama visited two months ago to collect campaign donations.  So why has the President fallen silent once again? After a while, people may get the idea this President cares more about his reelection war chest than he does the tone of our discourse. Read full column
Share/Bookmark

Jerome Block Jr. Gets Probation

From htrnews.com -Former state utility regulator Jerome Block Jr. avoided a lengthy prison sentence Wednesday as a state judge gave him probation for election law violations, misuse of taxpayer money and other felonies. Block had faced up to 4 years in prison after failing to comply with a plea deal requirement to complete a court-supervised drug treatment program. His attorney has said Block is addicted to prescription painkillers and cocaine. District Judge Michael Vigil placed Block on probation, including substance abuse treatment, and warned that Block could be sent to prison if he runs into more legal problems.  More News New Mexico
Share/Bookmark

Judge Weighs Release of Deming Gun Defendant

From postcresent.com -A federal judge is considering whether to release from-pretrial detention a member of a Deming family charged with selling weapons and ammunition to Mexican cartels. The Las Cruces Sun-News  reports attorneys for Ryin Reese argued before U.S. District Court Judge Robert C. Brack that their client be released with strict conditions including living with his girlfriend's mother who serves on the New Mexico Parole Board. Brack said he would take the motion under advisement and would likely rule sometime this week.  More News New Mexico
Share/Bookmark
     

Share/Bookmark